The Podcast for Project Managers by Project Managers. As we celebrate 100 episodes we thank our listeners who have joined us for the journey. In this podcast Nick expands on some lessons he has learned about project management from his time on Velociteach’s Manage This.

Table of Contents

00:06 … Celebrating 100 Episodes

03:29 … Nick’s New Adventure

07:00 … Reviewing Past Conversations

08:33 … Conducting Effective Meetings

10:13 … Virtual Team Communication

14:38 … Being Transparent and Maximizing Potential

17:59 … The Essential Components

19:27 … Importance of Integrity

22:45 … Building Blocks of a Project

24:24 … Dealing with Stress

25:34 … Cybersecurity: Creating Awareness

28:44 … Story from a Vietnam Veteran

31:55 … Learning Superior Processes

35:12 … Stimulate Progress and Maintain Excellence

39:00 … Great Leaders Bring Calm to Chaos

43:14 … Nick Signing Off

Celebrating 100 Episodes

NICK WALKER:  Welcome

to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  We are so proud and so excited to mark our

100th episode.  Everybody’s here to

celebrate:  Andy Crowe and Bill Yates,

producer Wendy Grounds, engineer Andie Leeds. 

And we’re so glad you have joined us for the celebration, too, but also

for joining us and supporting us in our Manage This journey over the past

several years.

Andy, I’m going to ask you, go back in time, tell us the story behind the podcast.  What was your vision for the podcast then, and has that changed over the years?

ANDY CROWE:  Well, Nick, that’s an interesting question.  You know, if you go back in time, I used to be on the project management speaking circuit quite a lot. And so one of the things that always happened is people would come up and say, “I’ve been listening to these CDs”  we used to produce CDs, now they’re digital downloads.  But Bill Yates and Louis Alderman and I were on there, and people would come up and say, you know what, “I’ve been driving around in the car, I’ve been listening to that.”  One person said that when their child misbehaved in the car, that they would actually make them listen to 30 minutes of that.

NICK WALKER:  Oh,

cruel and unusual punishment.

ANDY CROWE:  It was a

really funny interchange.

BILL YATES:  I’ll get

feedback on that one.

ANDY CROWE:  One of the things that I figured out during that series of conversations, though, is people would always come up afterward. And so they didn’t want to talk about what I had spoken on that evening at the project management meeting, they wanted to talk about the audio series that we did.

And I told Bill, I said, you know, there’s a few things.  Number one, project management is a really difficult job for a lot of people because you’re effecting change, and the world resists change.  So you have people trying to create something that doesn’t exist, to make something different, and this gives us a chance just to have a conversation with people.  Every couple of weeks we get a chance to talk, and it is, it is a conversation, so I like to think of it that way.

You know, so we get feedback from listeners, and we try and incorporate that into where we’re going.  But that was the whole goal is just to engage people, and part of it to say, look, we know it’s a tough job.  There are easier ways to make a living than being a project manager.  And at the same time people who do that for a living, a lot of times it’s more of a calling than a profession. So it’s something that you, you know, you can’t imagine doing anything else, it’s a chance for us to engage with people, and that’s the whole goal.  You know, we don’t monetize this podcast, we don’t sell ads, we don’t ask for donations, we’re doing it because we love this profession, too.

BILL YATES:  It’s a

way for us to connect with our tribe. 

When I think about some of the podcasts that have meant the most to me,

it’s when people are going through some of the same struggles that I have as a

project manager.  Nick,